楷维留学指南分享一篇SAT考试阅读资料精选——What is to be seen as history？希望SAT考生们能好好阅读和理解这篇文章，这能够让我们很好的理解历史这个词的意义。同时，很多观点可以直接使用在“To solve the present and future problems, it is necessary to understand the past.”这个题目中!

　　What is to be seen as history?

　　Although when we use the word "history" we instinctively think of the past, this is an error, for history is actually a bridge connecting the past with the present and pointing the road to the future. This fact Daniel Webster expressed many years ago in memorable nautical terms: "... when the mariner has tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glances of the sun, to take his latitude and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course." Webster here indicates one of the cardinal utilities of history. Since humanity is always more or less storm-driven, history serves as a crucial navigational instrument for the nations which, tossed as they are by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not identify their position.

　　History enables bewildered bodies of human beings to grasp their relationship with their past and helps them chart their immediate forward course. And it does more than this. By giving people a sense of continuity in all their efforts, red-flagging error, and chronicling immortal worth, it confers on them a consciousness of unity, a realization of the value of individual achievement, and a comprehension of the importance of planned effort, as contrasted with aimless drifting.

　　Modern people, especially when harried and perplexed by the sweep of events, peer earnestly into history for some illumination of their predicament and prospects, even though they may only read magazine articles or listen to the radio or television. And when great events rouse people to their most responsible temper, and fierce national ordeals awaken them to a new sense of their capacities, they turn readily to the writing of history, for they wish to instruct, and to its reading, for they want to learn. It was no accident that the First World War fostered such an interest in history that for a time the number of books in English devoted to history exceeded the titles in fiction.